Women, Power and Money

Keynote AddressSweet Briar College, Sweet Briar Virginia

I have to admit to a guilty thrill whenever I’m asked to talk about women, power and money.

Perhaps it’s because these three nouns were never linked when I was growing up in Kentucky.

Women then didn’t seem to have either power or money. In fact some of them did have one or the other, or even both—but that was kept disguised, like some kind of bad manners.

When you have learned to use your money, and your power, you will arrive at an appreciation of your womanhood unlike anything you have ever imagined.

I never put much stock in manners, perhaps because my ancestress, Mary Wortley Montague, the British writer and world traveller, wasn’t much interested in manners, either. When someone at a party was shocked by the sight of her dirty hands, Mary said, “you should see me feet.” And that was in the eighteenth century when people seldom bathed…

Yet even today, women who openly show an interest in power and money may be treated as though they ought to take a bath.

Why is that? Perhaps because power was never considered an appropriate adornment for a woman, and certainly not for a lady. Power brings conflict in its train, and we are taught early and well to avoid conflict at all costs—especially with men. Some of you may even remember when girls were not supposed to excel at academics or sports—excelling is a form of power—for fear that they wouldn’t get dates…

Yet there was a way a woman could use her money, if she had it, and that was by giving it away. My grandmother, who was a great cynic and therefore a great teacher, called that “flannel petticoat charity.”

That’s the form of Band-Aid giving that never addresses root causes of poverty or injustice, the kind of giving that Dorothea Brooks, in George Elliot’s Middlemarch, distrusted, the kind of giving we do now when we support various cosmetic companies’ campaigns to eradicate breast cancer without realizing that it is pollution that is causing this epidemic. Confronting root causes is difficult, but it is a most worthy exercise of power and intelligence. Giving money to buy Band-Aid solutions is a way of avoiding responsibility for what is causing our problems.

To give with power, to give in the fight against root causes, whether discrimination in all its forms, economic exploitation, servile acquiescence in government irresponsibility, prejudice, hatefulness wherever it is promoted—that brings us into the gunsights of those who want to control reality. But it also brings an incredibly sense of satisfaction—whether our goals are achieved or not.

For we can never know what one word of protest, one letter to the editor, one dollar sent to an unpopular cause will do in a future beyond our kin…

But before we can give away our money—and I think it’s safe to assume that everyone hearing me today has some money to give away—we must claim it.

This is particularly difficult in the case of inherited money. I didn’t inherit my money, I had to fight like the devil for it, but I didn’t earn it; it was earned by many other people. So I am in a way an inheritor and so it is doubly difficult for me to own these ill-gotten gains.

Ill-gotten because so many of the people who worked for my family’s monopoly corporations in Kentucky—especially the women, receptionists, secretaries and cafeteria workers—never accumulated enough money to do much in the world…

With this on my mind, I decided after the sale of the corporations to put about a third of my eleven percent of the total into an endowment for a new kind of foundation: a foundation that supports women artists who are feminists—who use their art for social change.

The Kentucky Foundation for Women is still one of only two foundations in the country that gives its grants to women artists who are feminists. There are now a few more foundations that support women than there were fifteen years ago, when I founded KFW, but most of them give money for basic survival needs. Band-Aids, expressions of empathy—but useless in attacking root causes.

If you believe, as I do, that the highest form of art alters the atmosphere and shapes the unconscious of its partaker, then you will understand why I feel the work of the Kentucky Foundation for Women is revolutionary. With each of our grants, we are saying, this woman is important, her art is important, and it will cause a change in those who see it, hear it, or read it. A change that we can’t quantify—and don’t want. A change that is silent, bold, unending…

Of course we were much criticized, at the beginning. Mainly we were accused of being crazy idealists and also possibly lesbians—the same criticism that is launched whenever women exercise power, as though being sane and heterosexual somehow weakens resolve and neutralizes outrage…

But then, maybe it does! Close contact with sanity, defined in our culture as convention, as fitting in—and close contact with men, defined as submission and pleasing—may very well weaken our resolve and neutralize our outrage. And we will certainly find ourselves better liked…

I am guessing that some of you here today may be in a position, either now or later, to set up a foundation to help yourselves, and other women, make a dent in this dreary world. Your own experiences in that world will provide a sharp goad to bring about change, if you are aware and awake… perhaps someone here today will also be aroused by her own experience to believe in the power of art to bring about change…

How did I arrive at this belief? I was fortunate as a child to be exposed to the paintings of El Greco in a big book of plates in the family library; I found I could not bear to look at one of his greenish, writhing crucifixions. Fear is a marvelous example of the working of power—the one glimpse I allowed myself of that crucifixion undid all the pastel images in my Sunday school coloring books… I would long since have abandoned the Episcopal church, with its pastel tones, if I had not been imbued with the power of that crucifixion…

Or, years later, when I saw The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago’s outrageous place settings absolved me of some of the shame of being a woman—just like that. For in my childhood, growing up female meant growing up ashamed… and now, the Brooklyn Museum of Art is building a new wing, thanks to a gift from Elizabeth’s Sackler’s foundation, to house The Dinner Party, which has been warehoused for decades, in a collection of feminist art—two words that, like women and power, are almost never seen together…

I could go on to cite my vision of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, on a staircase in the louvre, as an influence-but I was also persuaded on a personal level.

As a writer, I first recognized the power of words artfully used in a rather unfortunate way. My first published short story, written while I was at college, caused a storm because it revealed the then-shocking fact that young men and women at sometimes had sexual relationships. This was in the era of parietal rules when housemothers in housecoats patrolled girls’ dormitories… and served tea on Sunday afternoon.

So when my story, “Winter Term,” appeared in the Harvard Advocate and subsequently in Mademoiselle (this was when the women’s magazines published serious fiction), I was called in by the dean, a terrifying figure in suit, hat and gloves with a hateful little dog under her desk. She told me the story would stop alumni giving—and it was only eight pages long!

I learned the first and hardest lesson of my life as a writer then—for I deleted all references to Cambridge from the story. And of course it did no good, and I realized I had betrayed myself because I was frightened…

Now, as I look back on that frightened girl, I understand what a long journey I have come. It is the same journey that everyone in this room must travel, from the innocence of helplessness to the wisdom of power.
That is the journey I wish for all of you.

There is pain and terror along the way—no question of that. But when you have learned to use your money, and your power, you will arrive at an appreciation of your womanhood unlike anything you have ever imagined—or that your mother or your grandmother imagined. And that appreciation is indeed the crown only power, rightfully used, can confer.